Carl Hiaasen: "Delightfully Juvenile"
By Jessica Rae Patton, Associate Editor

Online Extra: Carl Hiaasen's musings on the writing process.

Carl Hiaasen knew by the ripe old age of six that he wanted to be a journalist. "My parents thought it was a little weird for a six-year-old to want a typewriter," the award-winning author told us. "But my dad said, 'Get him a typewriter.' I was very lucky." Young Carl wrote sports stories, primarily. Then there were the long, accusatory letters he would type up and slip under his parents' bedroom door. "If they wouldn't let me do something I wanted to do, I would set out a whole specific argument about why they were wrong and I was right," he laughed. Today Carl still writes angry diatribes about injustice, but in the form of a column for The Miami Herald (FL). He has also authored 16 (and counting) books for adults and two children's novels.

Teaching K-8 had the pleasure of interviewing Carl Hiaasen while he was in New York City promoting his second children's book, Flush (Knopf, 2005). The writer is notoriously reticent about interviews, yet talked freely with us for two hours, at the beginning of a publicity-packed day. Topics ranged from his stepson Ryan's scantily clad 13-year-old classmates ("Appalling!"); to the Dick and Jane reading books his mother sent his five-year-old son, Quinn, who carries them every- where ("It's interesting how timeless they are for a kid just learning to read"); to his unlikely entry into the children's market; to his favorite topic, his home state.

The deputy told me to empty my pockets: two quarters, a penny, a stick of bubble gum, and a role of grip tape for my skateboard. It was pitiful. "Go inside, He's waiting for you," the deputy said. My dad was sitting alone at a bare metal table. He looked pretty good, all things considered. He wasn't even handcuffed. "Happy Father's Day," I said. -From Flush

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The sunshine state. Born and raised in Florida, Carl Hiaasen still resides in the state he has described as "a paradise of scandals teeming with drifters, deadbeats and misfits drawn here by some dark primordial calling like demented trout." As passionately as he portrays these alternately sinister and sympathetic characters in his writing, his most colorful and lovingly rendered character is Florida's physical world itself - the tropical climate, verdant wetlands and serene waterways. The struggle to preserve this paradise and protect its nonhuman inhabitants is a recurrent theme in his adult books, and is also the driving matter and moral core of his children's stories. In Hoot (Knopf, 2002), a Newbery honor book, the motley cast of teen characters comes together to save a threatened habitat of burrowing owls, tiny birds that make their homes in underground dens. Noah, the narrator of Flush, teams up with his sister, Abbey, to expose the owner of a casino boat for dumping its nightly supply of sewage into the waters of the Florida Keys. Their father is in jail for sinking said boat in an act of eco-disobedience. The kids set out to do no less than prove his pollution claims, clean up the water and save their parents' marriage, which their mom has threatened to render extinct after her husband's latest antics.

Carl has always mined the local news for inspiration, and though no one has actually sunk a gambling boat, one gets the distinct impression it's a headline he wouldn't mind reading. "[These boats] are abominations. They have these big, noisy, smelly diesel engines. And there's very little enforcement in the Keys of the pollution laws." So, Carl put Noah and Abbey to the task.

Camera-shy Carl Hiaasen (left), with Teaching K-8 publisher, Allen Raymond, graciously endures a photo op.

He also references his own Floridian childhood for ideas. The imperiled owls in Hoot had no heroic rescue in real life. "I remember watching them be wiped out and the idea that my friends and I couldn't stop it," Carl said. "My parents would always say, 'It's progress; you can't stop progress.' That was the general attitude, so my thought was it would be awfully nice if, at least in my books, the kids could make a difference." It's a theme that resonates strongly with Carl's readers. "I've gotten hundreds and hundreds of letters from kids. They like the fact that these kids make the difference - and that adults don't ride in at the last scene and save the day."

Making fun of grown-ups. When an editor suggested he write a book for children, Carl Hiaasen thought, "This is clearly someone who's never read my books." His works for adults include best-selling novels, collections of his Miami Herald columns that cover local political scandals, dirty development deals and crimes against the environment and a critique of the Walt Disney Company delicately titled Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World. All are written with his trademark harpoon-sharp humor, and all are loaded with decidedly adult content. Still, he was intrigued by the idea of writing a book he could actually let Ryan, who was in fifth grade at the time, read.

Carl realized that he didn't need to alter his writing style or content matter much for a younger audience, except to tone down the language and put a sweater on the more racy material. But humor-wise, his tongue is still firmly planted in cheek. When asked what he thought of the Booklist review of Hoot that read, "There's always been something delightfully juvenile about Hiaasen's imagination," Carl laughed. "That's absolutely true. I spent my whole life making fun of grown-ups, so this wasn't a reach for me in these novels for kids."

Creating readers. In contemplating the leap to children's literature, Carl was concerned about and motivated by the stigma boys still attach to reading "too much," and that they just don't have the same relationship to and excitement about books that girls do. "I remembered how important reading was for me at that age," Carl said. He recalls devouring the Hardy Boys series, and "anything irreverent."

Carl has created male protagonists who encounter (and outsmart) bullies and have to deal with being the "new kid" in school. His characters also contend with disrupted home lives. A boy in Hoot is a runaway; the main characters in Flush fear their parents will divorce.

With his madcap plots and identifiable characters, Hiaasen has achieved a writer's dream: he's created readers. "I hear this all the time in letters from parents, and it's nice. They say, 'Hoot is the first book I ever got my son to read.' I've also had a lot of parents bring their kids to my adult book signings. The kid got a copy of Hoot and now he's reading everything in sight, and he just came to thank me. That's heartwarming when it happens. It's really terrific."

Online Extra: Carl Hiaasen's musings on the writing process.